1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a network system, a method and apparatus for processing information, and a control program, and more specifically to a network system, a method and apparatus for processing information, and a control program, for managing a personal computer or a peripheral device connected via a communication medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as personal computers (hereinafter referred to as PCs), and peripheral devices such as a printer, a scanner, and a digital camera are becoming very popular, a network such as a LAN (Local Area Network) has also become popular. As a result, there is an increasing need for sharing a printer, a modem, a scanner or the like among a plurality of PCs on a network. A large number of drivers for driving such peripheral devices are available, and methods of installing such drivers are also available.
However, when an upgraded version of a driver of a peripheral device becomes available to achieve an improved function or for another reason, replacement of the driver with the upgraded version must be performed by a user. Upgrading a driver by a user is generally performed as follows. New driver information is stored in a particular folder of a PC (such as a server PC) shared on the network, and drivers installed on the respective PCs are separately updated in accordance with the driver information stored in the particular folder.
However, the above-described method of upgrading drivers has the following problems. Each driver includes user information such as layout information or font information that is set as property information, and such user information is reset into an initial state when the upgrading is performed. Furthermore, when there is common device option information or the like that is set in a network system, such information is also reset into an initial state. Therefore, it is necessary to again set the property information of the driver after upgrading the driver. Thus, a troublesome and time consuming operation is required to set the property information after upgrading the driver. Besides, the complexity of the setting operation can cause the property information to be incorrectly set.
Thus, to avoid the above problems, there is a need for automatically upgrading a driver. For example, it will be useful to upgrade all drivers of PCs in response to a command issued by a system manager at a server PC or the like. This makes it unnecessary for a user of each PC to update the driver in accordance with new driver information store in a particular folder.
However, in practice, the procedure of installing, upgrading, and setting up a driver varies from a device to device. Besides, a troublesome operation is necessary to select the type of the driver depending on an environment in which the device or the client device is used. Furthermore, a troublesome operation is also required to add or modify a driver and set property information of the driver in accordance with a command issued by each client device. Thus, the problem is that the operation efficiency is very low.
As described above, in the case where setting of software of PCs is performed by users of respective PCs or by a system manager, a very troublesome task has to be performed in a very low efficiency manner. In recent years, in the case of a large-scale system, the number of PCs to which software is installed is increasing. Thus, it is necessary to set the properties of drivers of a large number of PCs after installing the drivers. Thus, users or system managers have to set a large number of PCs, and this can cause an incorrect setting.